Disallow dubiously-nested submodule git directories

Currently it is technically possible to let a submodule's git
directory point right into the git dir of a sibling submodule.

Example: the git directories of two submodules with the names `hippo`
and `hippo/hooks` would be `.git/modules/hippo/` and
`.git/modules/hippo/hooks/`, respectively, but the latter is already
intended to house the former's hooks.

In most cases, this is just confusing, but there is also a (quite
contrived) attack vector where Git can be fooled into mistaking remote
content for file contents it wrote itself during a recursive clone.

Let's plug this bug.

To do so, we introduce the new function `validate_submodule_git_dir()`
which simply verifies that no git dir exists for any leading directories
of the submodule name (if there are any).

Note: this patch specifically continues to allow sibling modules names
of the form `core/lib`, `core/doc`, etc, as long as `core` is not a
submodule name.

This fixes CVE-2019-1387.

Reported-by: Nicolas Joly <Nicolas.Joly@microsoft.com>
Signed-off-by: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>

1 files changed, 4 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/builtin/submodule--helper.c b/builtin/submodule--helper.c
index 79156fac45..3376b1bb29 100644
--- a/builtin/submodule--helper.c
+++ b/builtin/submodule--helper.c
@@ -678,6 +678,10 @@ static int module_clone(int argc, const char **argv, const char *prefix)
 	} else
 		path = xstrdup(path);
 
+	if (validate_submodule_git_dir(sm_gitdir, name) < 0)
+		die(_("refusing to create/use '%s' in another submodule's "
+			"git dir"), sm_gitdir);
+
 	if (!file_exists(sm_gitdir)) {
 		if (safe_create_leading_directories_const(sm_gitdir) < 0)
 			die(_("could not create directory '%s'"), sm_gitdir);